LinkedIn Profile

Archives

Leap Year Lesson #335: Set Ambitious Goals

My leap year lesson #3 way back on January 3 was to “Set Realistic Goals.” The point was that if we set unrealistic ones, we will eventually get discouraged and quit or fail. As we enter the final month of the year, I want to balance out the earlier lesson with one that challenges us to set ambitious goals – still realistic, but beyond what we know is easy to accomplish.

With only a month left of these daily lessons learned, I now know that it would take either being unconscious, in a coma or dead to keep me from reaching the goal of writing all 366 lessons by December 31. I would’ve hoped that to be the case when I made the commitment on January 1, but since there was always that slight possibility in the back of my mind that something could happen to cause me to give up, I have been cautious in claiming victory. I still can’t claim victory, of course, until #366 is published on New Year’s Eve. I’m confident that will happen.

For me, this has been an ambitious goal. While the lessons are short, they still consume about an hour of my time daily (give or take), so that’s no small commitment over the course of a year. Since I had only published 16 blog posts here prior to this year, committing to 366 was a big deal for me. At the end of this month, I look forward to writing some related posts to try to pull the experience together in my own mind.

I’m already thinking about what my ambitious goal for next year will be. I’m leaning toward it being reading one book per week while still blogging every other day. I’ll decide by the end of the month, of course, and let you know. Whatever I decide, though, I know it needs to be ambitious – something that really stretches me in some way beyond the norm. I usually read maybe 10 books a year maximum, so this would be a serious multiple of that and would allow me to finally take things from the “read someday” list to the “read this week” list.